Blue Angels Diamond Formation Static Display at the Naval Air Museum, Pensacola NAS, FL

I submitted 3 photos of this static display, and this one was the hardest to get a proper

exposure on due to the tremendous backlighting at the museum (skylights with the sun

shining straight through!). With no spot metering mode on the new Digital Rebel XTi, I did

my best with what I had to work with and came up with this. Anybody have any ideas as to

how I could have done it better?

From the purist perspective - Nothing more you could have done without blowing out the glass ceiling. As someone who has photographed this about a dozen times, you have to pick your poison. This photograph is pretty much how the eye sees it and without an artificial light underneath, this is about it.

You may also try a polarizing filter which may beef up the color and give you an opportunity to manage the amount of light bouncing off the planes. See the following page - Blue Angels (Blue Angel in front of fire has polarizing filter)

Other options include, visiting on an overcast day which would even out the light and allow a bit more on the underside of the aircraft, or enabling you to spot meter (whoops, not possible w/ your camera) the aircraft from underneath without completely blowing out the sky.

From the Photoshop perspective - Use the curves function to isolate the undercarriage and beef that up..... or

Using a tripod (really frowned on in museums, BTW) take two shots with histograms biased on either side of the spectrum (in other words, get one with the background and sky exposed correctly but underexposing the aircraft underside) and then another where the underside is correct and the sky is way overexposed. Then combine them in PS for a pretty interesting effect.

Best of luck.

David Bacon's multiple exposure combination is probably the most practical, but if you were a "purist" or wanted to do it with a film-based camera you could try the following:

Wait until it was late in the day, maybe even as late as dusk. Putting your camera on a tripod, I would shoot at a slow shutter speed (or even "B") and fire off a strobe multiple times or multiple strobes (the more powerful, the better up to a point).

Another way is to double expose a dusk shot, and when they turned on the display lights.